Borrowed Finery: A Memoir Read online

  Once, she had kept me from visiting a friend in the evening. She clutched her breast as I went to the door, crying weakly, “¡Ay, mi corazón!” as though she were having a heart attack. I reluctantly gave in, though I was unable to believe her expression of suffering genuine. The idea that she was suffering, because of her anxiousness about what might happen to me, never crossed my mind.

  Sometimes she tried to amuse me with stories; I was cold and refused to smile. Some days I would forget my resentment, released from the sullen sour feeling that troubled my own heart, until animosity toward her would overcome me again.

  My parents took turns driving, she expertly, he clumsily. We stopped at a diner, where I ate, uneasily, two fried egg sandwiches. Elsie watched me, forming, I was sure, conclusions about my character.

  South of East Jacksonville, we turned off the highway onto a sand road. It ended in a heavily wooded area where there was a scattering of homes on the banks of the broad St. John’s River. Close to a bluff stood a large, shambling, yellow-painted house inhabited by an elderly Scottish woman named Lesser, the housekeeper. She maintained an expression of bland benevolence on her face throughout the confusion of the weeks that followed, and I began to attribute it entirely to the physical configuration of her features.

  The high-ceilinged rooms were large and barely furnished. Below the bluff a gray wharf on crooked posts stood in the river. Everywhere I looked were floating patches of hyacinths in whose tangled roots—I learned later—water moccasins liked to shelter.

  First times were events: the first time I had been on a car trip with my parents, the first time we’d been in a diner, the first time we had eaten supper together in the dining room of the yellow house, served by Mrs. Lesser.

  My mother’s silence emphasized my father’s volubility. Nervousness pitched his voice higher than ever before. One night I spoke hesitantly of George Bernard Shaw, one of whose plays I had read recently to please my father. My mother rose abruptly from the table, overturning her chair, and ran up the stairs. Daddy followed her into the bathroom. I could hear them quarreling, and I noticed my father’s voice was pleasing even when he was angry. I stayed at the foot of the stairs, not knowing what to do.

  My father appeared in the upper hall and behind him stood Elsie. She called my name. Holding a napkin carelessly in his hand, he came down and walked into the dining room, shrugging his shoulders and murmuring, “I don’t know, pal, what she’s up to.”

  I went up the stairs, and my mother turned to go into the bathroom, where she sat on the rim of the tub. A fleeting impression of her inability to assume an ungraceful posture sped through my mind, along with my dread of what she would say.

  “You have no right to speak to Paul about George Bernard Shaw,” she said, without raising her head. “You have no right to tie your father’s shoelaces.”

  My hopes for I don’t know what withered. I was appalled by her assumption that I had been insolent—at least that’s what I thought it was that had evoked such words from her. She pushed herself upright and quelled me with a look before she walked into their bedroom.

  Two or three days later, they left Florida to return to New York City. During that time, my mother was polite to me. When I looked at her, she smiled neutrally.

  As they drove off, I felt they had not left me so much as forgotten my existence. I was trapped by my age, twelve. I was obligated to stay on with Mrs. Lesser.

  I walked into the kitchen as soon as they had driven away. The housekeeper looked up at me from shelling peas on the counter. Her neat hair, the cleanness of her apron, and her expression all conveyed to me that she attributed disorder to moral failing, whether it was in a dusty closet or in people’s lives.

  Disorder was defeat.

  She kept her own counsel, she was discreet, but she rebelled secretly with her whole being against the agitation she had sensed during their stay of a few days. It was undignified to allow oneself to be baffled, though she would forgive it in children.

  She took a few steps toward me and said, with a trace of a kindly smile, “We’ll have to find a nearby school for you next month.” It was during a day in August.

  * * *

  I went to a public school in East Jacksonville. Every weekday morning a school bus picked me up, and in the afternoon it dropped me off at the edge of the woods.

  Spanish moss hung from tree branches and brushed against my face like thick cobwebs. One afternoon, a snake dropped from a limb onto my shoulders before it slid to the ground and twisted away. It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time for horror. Horror struck me a few minutes later when I reached the house. I must have been pale enough to attract Mrs. Lesser’s attention. She asked me what was wrong and I told her. “God preserve us!” she said.

  The teacher of the seventh-grade civics class was a short man with a clever face. I sat in the last row with Lee, a tall, thin, handsome boy. Our civics textbooks were opened to conceal a travel book by Osa and Martin Johnson. We were reading it with romantic intensity, thinking of each other’s appreciation. Suddenly we sensed the teacher’s presence as we turned a page.

  “Interesting,” he murmured. “But out of place, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  Matt, a melancholy boy of ten who lived in a shabby plantation house a few hundred yards from the yellow house, took me out on the river in his small motorboat to catch the swells from the big ships that sailed in and out of Jacksonville.

  He advised me to jump on the wharf two or three times before venturing out on it. The thumping chased away the moccasins, which fell one by one from the wharf posts where they had been coiled and hidden, dropping into the water like thick gray ropes.

  One afternoon after school, we went up a narrow stream that emptied into the big river. We ducked to avoid low branches that arched over the water. Snakes could fall on us at any moment, but we were fearless, at least for those minutes when we pretended we were sailing up the Congo.

  The Scottish housekeeper employed a small black girl to do the chores she couldn’t manage because of severe arthritis in her hands. Mattie, like Matt, was ten.

  One afternoon I followed her flickering shadow through the woods a minute after Mrs. Lesser told her she could go home. She led me to a clearing where a little church with two tiny windows, looking like a child’s drawing, stood as if held upright. I found a wooden crate and dragged it to one of the windows and stepped up on it.

  Mattie was standing in a roughly nailed pulpit, her thin body concealed by a white robe that billowed as she swayed. She was “testifying,” as she told me later. She was a burning coal of spirit in the church, itself as makeshift as the wooden crate.

  We often played in the fenced-in yard behind the yellow house. Mattie’s eyes would suddenly focus on something I couldn’t see. Turning around, I’d find the housekeeper in the kitchen doorway, her soft plump hand holding the screen door open for Mattie to come back into the kitchen, where she might have to lift something, or stir a thickening pudding, or run through the woods to the plantation house to borrow a sweet pepper from Matt’s mother.

  When I arrived home one afternoon, Mattie walked toward me holding an object in her hand, a small peach-colored leather pocketbook, worn and scratched as though it had been worried by a Florida lynx, with a loose metal clasp in the form of an X. She handed it to me shyly, watching my face. Just as shyly I took it, not sure whether she was giving it or showing it to me. Was it hers? Had she found it on a road where it might have been tossed through a car window by an angry woman? No. She was making a present of it to me.

  * * *

  Lee drove me to his house half an hour distant. The day was brilliant, still. Not a leaf stirred. The narrow country road had a blue cast, and the mica in the paving was struck into sparks by the sunlight. He stopped the car.

  A huge snake was stretched across the road, its middle swollen. He got out of the car, looked thoughtfully at the snake, and then bent to gather it up like wet washing and carry
it to a ditch on the side of the road.

  Lee had an earnest, grave quality, perhaps because he was a scientific boy. After introducing me to his mother, he took me upstairs to his room at the front of the house. The windows overlooked a branch of the river. A microscope stood on a broad table covered with plant cuttings. It was beautiful there, the big house off by itself, a research laboratory in a wilderness of trees and water. I looked at a bug and a leaf through the microscope lens.

  On my thirteeth birthday, he drove to the yellow house in his Ford flivver with a gift, a very tall white lily in a small red pot.

  My other friend was a girl named Marjorie. Her life was a perpetual melodrama. She would greet me with the words—or a variation of them—“Guess what’s happened to me now!”

  * * *

  That spring three people came for a few days: my father, my Spanish grandmother, and the owner of the yellow house.

  Daddy arrived on a rainy afternoon, driving the car in which he and my mother had brought me to Florida in August. He had been shaken up on the way by nearly running into a dead cow lying on the road. It suddenly loomed out of the darkness in the headlights. His first day, the cow continued to loom before him in the shadows. He kept muttering “Jesus!” I could see by his face how it had shocked him, was still shocking him.

  He took me with him to a bench on the bluff from which we looked down at the wharf and the river. He had something to tell me, the reason he had driven a thousand miles.

  He and Elsie were getting a divorce.

  I had not thought of them as married. How could it be that Elsie was enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly for a term? What I was sure of was that fate had determined that her presence was the price I had to pay in order to see my father. But when I did see him, his behavior with me—playful, sometimes cruel, a voice of utterly inconsistent and capricious authority—confirmed my uneasiness, my ever-growing sense of being an imposter, outside life’s laws.

  But he had more to tell me. The second piece of news, preceded by the word “tragic,” was that Uncle Leopold was a homosexual. I was uncertain of what that meant. What I found nearly unbearable was the idea that Leopold should now know that I knew. Daddy said it was a crucial deviation from custom. Leopold couldn’t help it, he said. What was it he couldn’t help?

  I owned a secret full of danger, one that would so humiliate Leopold if I revealed it that he would cease to care for me.

  My father suddenly changed the subject. “Here! I don’t want you smoking behind my back!” he said, and held out a crumpled pack of Camel cigarettes. I shook my head no, still thinking about Leopold. Soon we were wrestling, only half humorously. The outcome was that I found a lit cigarette in my mouth.

  I didn’t take to smoking right away, but a few weeks later Marjorie and I lit up, coughed, and persisted.

  Nothing more was said about Leopold, divorce, or cigarettes during the three days he spent in the yellow house.

  The housekeeper asked him to cut down a dead tree that stood in the yard. I watched him use the ax. His face was taut with concentration as he deepened the cleft in the trunk. I put my hand to my throat. When the tree toppled, it made a noise between a groan and a shriek and appeared to me to fall in slow motion, a tree in a myth.

  On the last morning, after he said goodbye to Mrs. Lesser, whom he had charmed with his half-serious attentions, I walked with him to the car. I told him I hoped someone, by now, had removed the dead cow from the road. “Dear pal,” he said, pressing my shoulder with his hand.

  I watched him drive away down the sand road until the car vanished among the trees. He had taught me the rudiments of driving during his first visit with Elsie. He was a good teacher, explaining everything clearly and without impatience. I noticed, before the car disappeared, how he gripped the steering wheel and reared up in a spasm of panic, as if he expected at any moment for the car to run amok.

  * * *

  The second visit was from the owner of the house and Mrs. Lesser’s employer. Her name was Mary. She arrived with a friend, Thweeny. A few years earlier, they had both graduated from Smith College, along with the housekeeper’s daughter.

  Mary had fair curling hair, and, in the mornings of the week they stayed, she wore a pale pink linen housecoat to breakfast that I admired. She was pretty, with blue eyes that resembled my father’s. She had brought me a present, a book of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, The Pear Tree. She paid attention to me and behaved as if we were the same age.

  Thweeny was a tall bony woman, a large rag doll whose limbs flew around like windmill sails. Her long dark hair hung down to her shoulders in strips like licorice. She was clownish and likable.

  Mary told me Thweeny had been raped when she was thirteen. I knew in a general way what rape was. After I had heard about it, I looked at her with more interest.

  One morning the three of us got into the car and drove to St. Augustine. Mary brought along her camera. Except for Uncle Elwood, she was the only adult who took pictures of me.

  I told her my father was getting a divorce. I said I hoped she would marry him. She said she was my mother’s friend.

  * * *

  Mary and Thweeny left, and my grandmother arrived to spend a few days in the yellow house. I often interrupted a huddle in the kitchen between the two women. Once I heard the housekeeper exclaim, “Shocking!” I didn’t know what they were gossiping about. I found my grandmother’s presence oppressive. Her long looks at me and her sighs had a damp physical weight. She paid no attention to the house or the woods or the river. Her landscape was interior, the countryside of her emotions.

  * * *

  My father unexpectedly appeared again, to drive me back to New York. Before we left we made a visit to the bench on the bluff. From a house on our right, partly hidden by tropical foliage, a familiar-looking woman emerged. I had forgotten her name, but she greeted me as she walked past us on the narrow path.

  She had glanced disapprovingly at my father. Later that same day, she came to the back door of the house and asked the housekeeper for me. When I came to the door, she whispered that my mother was telephoning from New York City and wanted to speak with me.

  In those days a long-distance call was uncommon and usually meant an emergency. I followed the neighbor to her house. The telephone receiver was lying beside the base. I picked it up and listened. I heard breathing. Elsie said, “Is that you, Paula?” I said yes. She then asked, as if she already knew the answer, “Do you love me?”

  Who was I to love such a person, and who was she to be loved? I was frightened by her question; there was something in her voice that made loving her a punishment. But I said yes. I was painfully aware of the neighbor listening nearby.

  She asked me to get hold of Mary’s diary and read it to her. She gave me the telephone number of where she would be waiting for my call. “But Mary’s not here,” I protested weakly. Elsie answered that she would arrive any day now. She explained what a diary was, as though I were brain damaged. I agreed to do what she asked, though I didn’t mean to, any more than I intended to return her call.

  Mary arrived the very next day. I was so tormented by the turmoil I felt, by the neighbor’s evident dislike of my father, by the news about Leopold he had given me, by Elsie’s telephone call, that when Daddy asked me sternly what was troubling me, I burst into sobs.

  The two of us were sitting on the bench. It suddenly occurred to me I could run away. But to what? My parents filled the world.

  Daddy put his arm around my waist. “There, there,” he murmured.

  “Elsie telephoned me and asked me to read her Mary’s diary,” I said, immensely relieved to tell him.

  He only said, “Things will be better soon.” We sat there for a long while.

  * * *

  Mattie and Matt came to say goodbye. Lee brought me a twenty-page letter to read on the way north. Marjorie cried, as she often did, about things both large and small. I saw a tear run down Matt’s soft,
freckled cheek. Mattie smiled and held my hand for a minute.

  As the three of us drove away, Mary, Daddy, and I, with the housekeeper waving her apron goodbye, goodbye, I was struck by the thought that the last weeks had resembled a Marx Brothers movie: people rushing in and out of the yellow house, drawing themselves up, making peculiar faces, attacking, retreating.

  Somehow, I had managed to get through classes. I had one more year until high school.

  * * *

  I returned to my grandmother’s apartment in Kew Gardens, leaving my father and Mary in her Greenwich Village apartment. I went back to P.S. 99 and, following Mary’s example, began to keep a diary. I had written in it every day for only a few weeks—the entries were self-conscious and stiff—when I discovered my grandmother reading it behind the bedroom door.

  She was flustered and her face turned red. She said she had picked it up from a table because it was so evidently new. I stared at her, hard-eyed. Then I took the diary from her unresisting hands. I wouldn’t admit to myself that my intention to keep a journal had been weak from the beginning, and I had been about to stop writing in it anyway.

  * * *

  My grandmother told me about her father, Señor Vicente de Carvajal, and her husband, Fermin de Sola. Carvajal had come to Cuba to visit his two daughters, my grandmother and her older sister, Laura. He was said to be the best chess player in Spain, and while he was in Havana he taught a Cuban boy, known as Capablanca when he grew up, to play chess.

  His daughter Laura had been sent to medical school on the island by her father. I recall a photograph of her with other members of her graduating class. Hers is a small face among bearded men. It was toward the end of the nineteenth century, and she was permitted only to enter into pediatric practice.

  During my many months in Cuba, my grandmother had taken me to visit Tía Laura, my real great-aunt. She was retired, by then, and living in the country. We had supper with her and afterward went into the wild moonlit garden. A fire burned beneath a large black cauldron. I recall that she wore a black dress, silvered by the moonlight, and stirred dulce de leche, a Cuban sweet, with a huge ladle.